Posts Tagged ‘Pope’

The Marxistsat the World Council of Churches and Pope Francis think they are going to bring the world together in harmony and love with a conference in September on defeating xenophobia and the menace of political populism (just as a major power shift fueled by populism is sweeping Italy).

Maybe they would get a lot farther in bringing peace to the world if they cut out the insulting language….just saying!

…..where you will be made to feel guilty if you aren’t interested in the message about helping the (foreign) stranger when you see poverty and homelessness all around you!

I don’t really want to write about this again, but awhile back I said that every time I saw a Catholic publication promoting propaganda about their charitable work for refugees and immigrants without mentioning that they are paid MILLIONS of taxpayer dollars for their ‘religious’ good works, I would write about it.

***Update***Worse than we even thought! Reader finds 2016 funding. Read all about it here.

This is from a South Jersey Catholic publication. Not a word about the fact that the US Conference of Catholic Bishops (as one of nine federally funded resettlement contractors***) is paid millions annually from the US Treasury.

For nearly 50 years, the Catholic Church has celebrated National Migration Week, which kicks off this weekend, Jan. 7.This year’s purpose takes on a special significance in light of Pope Francis launching the two-year Share the Journey campaign in September 2017.

Share the Journey is a worldwide effort to build understanding and support within local communities for immigrants and refugees who have come to new lands to rebuild their lives. The campaign is sponsored globally by Caritas Internationalis and in the United States by Catholic Charities USA, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, and Catholic Relief Services.

[….]

“National Migration Week, and the Share the Journey campaign in particular, are invitations to people of all ages to engage with migrants in a meaningful way, and to be warm and welcoming of these newcomers,” noted Patrick Barry, director of Refugee and Immigration Services at Catholic Charities, whose mother was a Cambodian refugee who fled the Khmer Rouge regime in the 1980s.

“It’s been amazing to see how many groups, nonprofits and institutions have engaged in this campaign and demonstrated their support,” he said.

[….]

“As Catholics, we believe in the human dignity of all people. And so we are called to stand with refugees and immigrants as our brothers and sisters,” said Kevin Hickey, executive director of Catholic Charities, Diocese of Camden, and Catholic Charities USA Trustee.

And so, why not stand for the human dignity of your fellow Americans (first!) who are struggling with hunger and homelessness?

The answer: there is no money in it!

The USCCB’s Migration Fund is 97% funded by you, the taxpayer.

See my most recent write-up on funding for contractors where I report on the USCCB’s 2014 annual report. After I found this one and first reported on it a few years ago, I have never found a more up-to-date financial statement for their migration fund. I wonder why!

By the way, in Burma (aka Myanmar), the majority Buddhist population does not think the group of people referred to as Rohingya are anything more than Bangladeshi ethnics who got in to the Buddhist country from Muslim Bangladesh over decades. That is why the word, setting them aside as some special ethnic group, should the Pope utter it, will not sit well with his hosts.

Pope Francis has arrived in Myanmar, becoming the first pope to ever visit the southeast Asian nation.

Pope Francis exchanges gifts with Burmese leader Aung San Suu Kyi who has been a greatly admired human rights activist. However, in recent years she has refused to promote the meme that the Rohingya are completely blameless in the violent clashes between Buddhists and Muslims and thus has been vilified by the Human Rights Industrial Complex.

The world’s most high-profile Christian takes center stage in a staunchly Buddhist country accused of horrifying acts of brutality against its Rohingya Muslim minority.

The Pope previously decried the violence against the Rohingya, calling them his persecuted “brothers and sisters.”

Experts warn that this trip will require balancing a uniquely complicated set of humanitarian, diplomatic and religious questions. Even his own cardinal has advised the Pope to steer clear of the word Rohingya for fear of stalling his message of reconciliation before it has even begun.

Aaron Connelly, research fellow at Australia’s Lowy Institute, said that there was little chance the Pope’s visit to Myanmar was going to be a “generic Papal visit.”

“Clearly the thing that motivated this visit was always a desire to talk about the Rohingya,” he said.

“The question is … is he going to do that in a way which is less confrontational and engages?” Connelly added. “Or is he going to say, this is outrageous, these people have a right to be in Myanmar?”

Reading almost like an afterthought, here is the last line of this news:

While Pope Francis’s stance on the Rohingya crisis will likely dominate headlines, the Pope is also expected to push for greater rights for the several million members of Myanmar’s Christian minority.

Why does all of this matter to you in America? We have already admitted nearly 20,000 Rohingya ‘refugees’ in the last ten years. I’ll be updating numbers soon.

For more on Rohingya, see my Rohingya Reportscategory herewith 214 previous posts.

See Pope in a pickle by George Neumayr at American Spectator (hat tip: Judy).

(Before you go on with your laugh, you need to know that the Buddhists do not recognize the label ‘Rohingya’ because they think the Muslims in Burma (aka Myanmar) are simply Bangladeshi Muslims who moved into Burma illegally and deserve no special label. I’ve followed the issue for ten years and have a huge archive, Rohingya Reports, here. The latest outbreak of violence that began in 2012 resulted from a brutal rape and murder of a Buddhist girl by a gang of Muslims, something the media never mentions! You also need to know that the US has admitted thousands of Rohingya to America, most of them arriving in recent years.)

In late August, the New York Times reported on a controversy only a pope like Francis would bother to court. Like many of his fellow Jesuits, Pope Francis exudes enthusiasm for every religion except his own. Out of this hyper-ecumenism has come a torrent of flaky tributes to what his predecessors would have called “false religions” and silly trips to remote countries with almost no Catholics.The Times reported on one such upcoming trip to Myanmar/Burma: “Pope’s Planned Visit to Myanmar Risks Stoking Religious Tensions.”

Pope to Burma in November—watch for it! Should be fun!

The tensions to which the article refers don’t involve Catholics. There aren’t enough of them around to start a fight. The article refers to the fighting between Muslims and Buddhists. The latter group evidently finds the pope’s Islamophilia annoying and wants him to keep his nose out of their business. In February, Pope Francis rebuked Burma’s Buddhists for mistreating Muslims from Bangladesh who call themselves the Rohingya: “They have been suffering, they are being tortured and killed, simply because they uphold their Muslim faith.”

[….]

Besides, talking about his “Rohingya brothers” gives him a break from the difficult work of having to explain away jihad. Here is an opportunity, as Vatican correspondent Sandro Magister pointed out, where he can defend Muslims in the role of the persecuted instead of the persecuting.But the problem, as Magister notes, is that it also puts him in the awkward position of criticizing Buddhism, another religion that he is inclined to cast as impeccably peaceful. Maybe he can find a way to blame the tensions on Catholics, whose numbers in Burma’s dioceses have swelled to the point where they can fit into the back of a mini-van.

The Times gingerly approaches this squabbling among two groups of religionists it normally wants to protect and sanitize. The Times is also loath to criticize an interfering liberal pope. But even from its elliptical reporting one gets the sense that the Buddhists would prefer that the pope virtue-signal somewhere else…

This is a must read for those of you who love irony (and how dumb Leftist drivel gets them in trouble).

African migrants claiming to be asylum seekers (they are not, they are economic migrants and criminals) set fire to a refugee center on the Italian island of Lampedusa earlier this week (Hat tip: Pamela Geller).

A group of Tunisian migrants set fire to the main pavilion in a Lampedusa refugee welcome center Tuesday night, causing severe damage, after learning they would be repatriated to their home country, according to reports. [They were determined to not be legitimate refugees.—ed]

The fire enveloped the first aid and reception center of Imbriacola in Lampedusa, which presently houses some 530 asylum-seekers, though no injuries have been reported. This is not the first time that migrants have set the pavilion ablaze. Similar acts of arson occurred in 2009 and then in 2011.

After hours battling the fire, which was set around 10:30 pm, teams of firefighters stationed on the island were finally able to get the blaze under control in the early hours of Wednesday morning.

[….]

Reports suggest that in recent weeks tensions had already been growing inside the Lampedusa welcome center, linked to the refusal by a group of African migrants, mainly from Eritrea and Yemen, to submit to identification and registration procedures including the taking of fingerprints.

When is the last time you have seen news like this at any mainstream media outlet or on cable news? One day America will wake up to the fact that Europe is lost and they will wonder how that happened so quickly. It hasn’t been that quick! We have reported on the invasion for many years now and chronicled the inability (unwillingness) of European leaders to stop it!

You knew the minute you heard it—that the Pope choosing 12 Muslims to take to Rome with him on his plane—was one of the more troublesome actions (of a long list) of this Socialist Pope. See our post on the Pope’s Syrian Muslim refugees by clicking here.

Now from the Daily Mailyesterday. It answers our primary question—weren’t there any Christians and other religious minorities to choose from?

And, this bureaucratic (red tape!) excuse for passing up this brother and sister is ridiculous.

A Christian brother and sister from Syria say they have been ‘let down’ by the Pope after he left them behind in a Lesbos refugee camp despite promises they would be given a new life in Italy.

Roula and Malek Abo say they were two of the lucky ‘chosen 12’ refugees selected by the Vatican to be taken from the desperate camp and housed in Rome.

But what seemed like the chance of a lifetime was cruelly snatched away when they were told the following day they couldn’t go. Instead three Muslim families were taken.

Neither Community Sant’Egidio, the charity which organised the trip, or the Vatican would explain the selection process over which migrants were picked.

Spokesman Massimiliano Signifredi called the incident ‘regrettable’ – adding: ‘The problem here is the three Syrians arrived after the March 20 deadline. They arrived just after the agreement between the European Union and Turkey.

Mr Signifredi said: ‘Our staff went to Lesbos and spoke with the people who were selected. But everything was decided by the Vatican.

‘The question why the Pope took only Muslims is difficult to understand and he was suffering, I think, because he wanted to do something also for Christians as the chief of the Catholic Church. But he couldn’t because there is this international agreement [with the EU].’

Invasion of Europe news…..

I wasn’t planning to write about the Pope’s propaganda stunt in Greece late last week where he visited the island of Lesbos and picked 12 lucky Syrian Muslims to take back to Rome with him, but there is one little bit I want you to see in this report from The Guardian.

One of the major themes throughout the last nearly nine years that I’ve written this blog has been the criticism toward phony Christian/Jewish charity that depends on stealing from taxpayers in order to help the downtrodden all the while claiming credit for being charitable.

I don’t consider that charity—taking Caesar’s money and transferring it from one group of people to another isn’t charity! But, it has become such an established practice no one seems to think about it anymore.

So, see this toward the end ofThe Guardianstory (which by the way does not tell us if the Pope’s 12 Syrian Muslims will live completely on the Vatican’s dime and not the Italian government—something I doubt we will ever learn because the answer is probably that the Italian taxpayer will be footing their bill for years to come).

Get this! the Pope has been unable to persuade European Catholic Dioceses to take in refugee families!

Is it because they are primarily Muslim ‘refugees,’ or because the churches have become so conditioned to the concept that ‘Christian’ charitable money comes from the taxpayer that they no longer want to pony-up out of their own private funds? A little of both? Who knows?

The three families, who had initially set their sights on reaching Germany or another European country, were expected to seek asylum in Italy.

Their arrival brings to about 20 the number of refugees living in the Vatican, which has fewer than 1,000 inhabitants. A similar intake across Europe would see 6 million people given asylum on the continent of 300 million. [Does the Vatican give them special Muslim prayer rooms, etc.—ed]

Last year, the pope appealed to every Catholic diocese in Europe to take in a refugee family, an appeal that fell on deaf ears across most parts of the continent.

The number of migrants arriving in Greece has fallen drastically since Turkey agreed to take back all those landing on the Greek islands in return for billions in EU cash and other concessions.

And, by the way, never forget that it is Turkey that originally allowed the launch of hundreds of thousands of Middle Easterners and Africans from their shores to invade Europe. Most of the Syrian Muslims were safe in Turkey.

For all of our posts on the ‘Invasion of Europe’ click here. And, don’t forget, it was this Pope who first welcomed the invaders to Europe when he blessed the migrantson Lampedusa in 2013.